It seems as though Google continues to be more transparent than in the past, which is great for webmasters. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to take part in a Q&A with the famous Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.  One of the attendees asked Matt about the Penguin update and what it meant going forward.  I’m paraphrasing Matt here, but he said that webmasters should expect Penguin updates to continue and to be "jarring" for a…

Google announced this week that they would be making further adjustments to their algorithms, specifically with the Penguin and Panda parts of it. If you’ve been reading our blog and following our advice you should have nothing to worry about because you will already be creating good content. If not you might want to pay attention because the adjustments to the algorithm are…

Every successful business wins because it has at least these dimensions:  The Paper, The Plan—and The People.

In an NCMi Leading Your Dealership to Success course that I taught in April, I made three “punch-in-the-nose” statements in my introductory comments that were related specifically to the retail automotive industry:

1. Most (a lot more than 50%) auto dealership employees give…

One measurement of website success tends to get overlooked a lot in favor of other, bigger numbers like traffic and bounce rate. That measurement is conversion rate, what percentage of visitors to your website convert into a lead. One of the biggest factors when it comes to…

Entrepreneurs: They Embody the American Dream

The late Peter Drucker once said, “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” CCI practices entrepreneurship.

Small business owners by the millions are eagerly waiting for the next election to learn how the upcoming years will effect not only their ability to grow and profit, but to continue toward the goals that are infused by their enthusiasm. They want to…

I recently read an article published by Forbes titled …

If you didn't get a chance to read or hear about this on Friday, here is a great, legitimate way to fight back with Google's decision to remove dealers positive reviews, leaving behind only negative and damaging a dealers reputation.It was written by Greg Goebel, CEO of Auto Dealer Monthly magazine.

No different than numerous dealers, a client of mine, 25-year dealer Mohammad Ahmed―president of Northend Motors in Canton, Mass., in the Boston area―had numerbous positive…

Facebook has rapidly become one of the biggest players in the SEO field. Weʼve given you tips on how to make social network marketing work for you in the past, but itʼs time for an update. Facebook is implementing a major change by making their new Timeline layout…

Studies indicate that a child will hear the word NO anywhere between 140,000 to 200,000 times while growing up compared to only fractional amounts of hearing the antonym Yes. Today as adults, it’s no wonder why we will go to great lengths to avoid hearing the word No -particularly in sales. What air is to breathing is what No’s are to selling-the key to survival.…

All too often I see dealers (and just about everyone else) posting images multiple times in the same day using a single tool. It could be Instagram, Hootsuite, Buffer, KPA Local Engage, Path, or any of dozens of great…

So you've created your dealership's Google+ Brand Page in preparation for the move from Google Places to Google Plus Local...but now what?  Here are some tips for optimizing your dealership's Google+ page:

Keep SEO in Mind: When putting information into the "About Us" tab, use relevant keywords. Also use these terms when adding content to your page to help search engines (especially Google) understand what your page is about.  Use "Recommended Links" to send…

That probably sounds like a funny question, but it’s a very important one to those of us on the NCMi faculty.  Many times our instructors have had managers show up for a class, some unwilling, who think they have been around the block enough times to be able to teach it themselves. However, low and behold, those same managers will leave the class with knowledge and understanding they didn’t realize they needed. The concept behind the question is that we all learn to master skills in…

Recently Google started offering vanity URLs for Google Plus. The announcement stated that the vanity URLs will start being rolled out with a few verified users but it will soon become available for all users. Finally this is what many of us have been waiting for with Google+ no more massive strings of numbers in your URL now you can just have a simple short URL like…

Seems whenever whatever company I was working for placed an ad for a service writer, I would get a deluge of resume's, phone calls and people walking in.My first test for them was the application. If they came back in one minute or less with their name scribbled on front with "see attached" written across the application. Strike one. 

If they contacted me in some way and asked, "what is a service writer". That was usually a strike two but I wouldn't necessarily toss that one away…

You might want to re-think the ask

You want to increase the number of reviews written about your dealership on online consumer and automotive review sites, right? The first step in any review-building initiative is developing a system or process for consistently asking satisfied customers to write reviews. But if you want to accelerate your results, maybe it’s time to take another look at how you are positioning the…

Many times, many of your in store problems can be fixed by doing one simple thing. Change the culture of the store with the customers and with the employees,

I worked at a large Jeep stored that gave out a loaner car for every customer that came into service for anything including an oil change. Meanwhile we had a shuttle van that was used more as a parts van than a shuttle. I noticed many of the loaner invoices showed car being brought back with 10 miles or less on them. At the time,…

Are you making the most of your customer reviews?

A good customer testimonial offers valuable return on investment and can help push potential buyers through the buying process and into your dealership. 

Unfortunately, when we went to work to find out what makes a good customer testimonial, we found that most dealerships aren’t using the right strategies to…

People generally don’t like hearing the word “no”.

“Is there any milk left in the fridge?” “No.”

  “Have you made these copies for me yet?” “No.”

  “I can see you really like this car.  Should we go into my office and get the paperwork started?” “No.”

A "no" can be a "yes" down the road.

The third exchange above is a…